Agent Emmerich

From the ramparts of Belvedere Castle, in Central Park, Noah Emmerich looked down on the Delacorte Theatre with a half smile. It was a spring day, and Emmerich, in jeans and an indigo T-shirt, was recalling another spring day at the Delacorte, thirty-one years ago. In 1982, Emmerich, who was then seventeen, had helped organize a student rally against nuclear weapons; some nine hundred people heard ruminative songs played by James Taylor and Richie Havens and ringing words from Bella Abzug.

Emmerich also spoke. “I remember worrying about my stutter, but I talked about our authentic fear of thermonuclear disaster,” he said. “And we all sang a song I wrote: ‘We are the future generations, we hold the future in our hand, please help us something something something, please help us make them understand’ ”—his lilting baritone broke off into laughter. “I really felt that we could run the world better than the grownups, who couldn’t be trusted.”

Emmerich planned to pursue constitutional law and dreamed of landing on the Supreme Court. His Dalton School classmate and fellow-organizer Abigail Pogrebin recalls, “Noah spoke Italian and knew about art—he was worldly before the rest of us. His energy was big, his voice was big, his humor was edgy—he was a leader.”

His fears of mutually assured destruction, like those of his schoolmates, dissipated with the breakup of the U.S.S.R. But somehow, he said, “I ended up back in the early eighties again, dealing with the Soviet threat.” Emmerich stars on “The Americans,” the FX drama about Soviet spies living undercover in a Washington, D.C., suburb during the Reagan years of space-based lasers and lumpy sweaters. He plays Stan Beeman, a bighearted F.B.I. agent in counter-intelligence who, like everyone else on the show, begins to betray his beliefs in the name of upholding them.

Camouflaged by a three-day stubble, but unmistakably himself, the actor politely declined a Park employee’s request to take his picture. He’d just finished shooting the show’s first season (the finale airs this week), and said he was “a little on edge about being recognized in the real world as Stan, because Stan—from living in a dark reality where duplicity is the norm, mistrust is the currency, and murder is the standard—goes off the rails.” He described the episode in which Beeman, to avenge his missing partner, kidnaps a blameless young K.G.B. operative. The G-man hands the puppy-faced kid a burger, “and then I get up,” Emmerich said, “all kindly, offer him a Coke—and I shoot him in the back of the head.” His eyes widened in disbelief. “Yeah, I kill him. I say ‘I’—it wasn’t me, I didn’t do it! Stan is not bald, and I am!”

When Emmerich first acted, in a Yale production of “Anything Goes,” it felt natural. “In acting, I learned that, if I played like I wasn’t going to stutter, then I wouldn’t.” His big break came when, in 1998, he played Marlon in “The Truman Show,” a genial figure who uses all his warmth and decency to keep his buddy, Truman (Jim Carrey), from discovering that his life is being broadcast worldwide as a reality show. “It was my Nurse Ratched moment,” he said. “People would come up to me for years and say, ‘How could you do that to your best friend? How could you?’ I have a generally affable quality, a demeanor that reads as friendly—but from that role it got into the subconscious of the audience that I’m duplicitous, the dichotomy guy. Even now, people like me but don’t trust me.”

Emmerich became absorbed in watching two pigeons bill and coo—“I have never caught pigeons doing that, the billing! And I’ve seen a lot of pigeons!”—then, somewhat reluctantly, shook himself back to the present. “Acting is repeated abandonment of self,” he said. “Someone else gets to live in your brain, some writer. And being a meat puppet is an adolescent fantasy that, at some point, becomes unsatisfying. It’s a way of understanding humanity, but not a way to understand your own specific voice.”

He glanced at the empty fan of seats below and said, “From this vantage point, I wonder what the younger Noah would say to me, and vice versa. I think the younger Noah would say, ‘Stop renting your brain out, stop saying other people’s lines.’ And the older Noah—who realizes that there are no grownups, and that the world is run by people as screwed up and ignorant as everyone else—would tell the younger Noah, ‘Just go to law school, man!’ ” ♦